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Language tools

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Revision as of 10:42, 3 June 2024 by Nikerabbit (talk | contribs) (→‎Status updates: May 2024)

The Language team has the goal of reducing the language barrier that users face when accessing or sharing knowledge. The team has created tools to facilitate the participation of our users regardless of their language. These include the creation of multilingual content and software, facilitate language navigation, and support for easy input and proper display of different scripts. Language tools and their infrastructures need regular maintenance and update efforts. Making our language tools and infrastructure work better helps all the projects that rely on them, and saves time and efforts to the people participating in them, from developers to translators and the final users.

In July 2018, an effort was started to identify key areas to improve in our language tools during the upcoming months. The affected tools, the plan and the status updates are described next.

List of tools

Language tools are listed below:

  • Translate extension . The infrastructure used to translate our software and multilingual pages. Communities of translators use it on Translatewiki.net and Wikimedia Meta-wiki.
  • Universal Language selector . Provides easy access to language settings, and facilitates language selection in different contexts including interlanguage links .
  • Project Milkshake. Developer libraries for internationalisation support on the web including input methods, web-fonts, and grammatical rules for languages that can be used on both Wikimedia and external projects.
  • MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle . A collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki which desires to be multilingual.
  • Content Translation . The tool to facilitate translation of Wikipedia articles across languages. Since it is in active development, the progress of this tool won't be tracked as part of the current maintenance effort, but as part of its own project page for the new version .
  • MinT. A machine translation service based on open source neural machine translation models released by other organizations with an open source license. Since it is in active development, the progress of this tool won't be tracked as part of the current maintenance effort, but on its own project page.

Maintenance plan

Since there is a wide catalog of language tools and potential areas to improve, we are keeping a list of current maintenance responsibilities and levels in our team Phabricator page.

Status updates

May 2024

April 2024

March 2024

February 2024

January 2024

December 2023

November 2023

October 2023

September 2023

August 2023

July 2023

June 2023

May 2023

April 2023

March 2023

February 2023

January 2023

December 2022

November 2022

October 2022

September 2022

  • Disabled machine translation suggestions from Apertium for some language pairs in the Translate extension based on user requests.
  • Explored options on how to improve the performance of Special:PageTranslation while also supporting new filtering features.
  • Improved the feature to show latest edit summaries to translators by improving the layout and formatting of relative dates.
  • Fixed a workflow issue with aggregate message groups in the Translate extension.
  • Deployed a fix for a bug that was resulting in an empty recent changes when no language was selected
  • Investigated and fixed an issue that was causing a delay in updating translation pages
  • Deployed a fix that blocks translations from users for a blocked translatable page.

August 2022

July 2022

June 2022

May 2022

April 2022

March 2022

February 2022

January 2022

December 2021

November 2021

September 2021

August 2021

July 2021

June 2021

May 2021

April 2021

March 2021

February 2021

January 2021

December 2020

November 2020

  • MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) 2020.10 was released, see release notes here.
  • New system admins are now able to do puppet changes for translatewiki.net after reading our new documentation.

October 2020

September 2020

August 2020

July 2020

June 2020

May 2020

April 2020

March 2020

February 2020

January 2020

December 2019

November 2019

October 2019

September 2019

August 2019

July 2019

May 2019

April 2019

February 2019

January 2019

December 2018

November 2018

October 2018

September 2018

July 2018